Both ludicrous and completely plausible, Sound of My Voice sets out to hit the same emotional notes as 2011’s Another Earth. It gets pretty close.

Brit Marling (Maggie) is the hypnotic drawcard, but it is our identification with Peter and Lorna that gets us early and keeps us under Marling’s spell.

Swept up in Peter’s obsessive tunnel vision, we share his momentum but are uncertain as to exactly what he pictures at the end of his tunnel. When guns and crazy ladies start to impose on button-nosed Lorna, our instinct is to get off this train, but Batmanglij and his forces (both on-screen and off) coax us into complicity.

This sort of sci-fi psycho drama is certainly a winning formula, and the mix of suspense and wry laughs keeps our cinephile nerve ends tingling.

One imagines some stray narrative threads in the editor’s recycle bin, leaving just enough dangling conversations to keep an active mind involved well after the end credits.